Brand building and social media

I took the time to get to know a superb team of brand builders today, www.yalosquality.com has a sample of their work through sadly not a lot of the more recent stuff. They know what they are good at and they really focus on those details of a brand that matter, especially in packaging. It got me thinking about all the social media so called brand building.

In essence you need to know three things to start with: who do you want to get into your net?(work) What gets onto your customers radars? (Rather pointless these days to talk about media ‘consumption’.) And where does the rest of your team fit into this effort? (Your employees or anyone else you feel is on your side.)

It seems self evident to say you need a target but with social media this is not an easy task. It isn’t a box sitting on a shelf, limited in many respects in its effects. It bridges PR, community, investors and any other partnership in ways so complex it is infuriating to try and explain many times. In normal brand building, people like the fantastically able people at Yalos make sure that everything is perfect. The best possible take on all aspects of the brand. In social media we are battling to achieve a degree of transparency which is almost in opposition with classic testimonials or case studies. We are looking for a convincing ‘person’ of a brand.

And this ‘person’ cannot be driven by a single entity. It has to be the live sum total of customers’ living with the brand. But as clear as they are conversing with a friend. Except they aren’t sitting down to share a coffee and a long chat. They are saying ‘hi’ as they pass each other in the supermarket, ‘how are you’ as they pick up their kids from school and ‘we should get together some time’ as they sit next to each other for five minutes at basketball practice. That’s life today, even with ‘normal’ regular real people friends!

Let me be clear about one thing: for most companies I wouldn’t dream of putting up anything on a social network that can be demolished. I recently witnessed the online bashing of www.getitnow.gr , what seemed a much promising eshop type venture in Greece with serious levels of investment. Their facebook page had all the right ingredients but once the complaints started, it seems impossible to put a lid on the hell it let loose! You can’t delete a comment you don’t like, everyone will know instantly. Server problems? Delays? Confusion? Even if they were perfect from the start they would have been in for it. When behemoths like P&G are struggling to make sense of it all you know we have a challenge.